The Dean Cain Retribution - Part 1

Diane stood still, peering down into the frame of solace gripped between her digits. Salty canals juddered down her cheeks, rapids of melancholy sucked by gravity’s warm indignation. Those eyes in the frame stared solemnly back at her, each brown swirl in the iris almost motioning her to towards consolation. After a moment she put down the encased photograph and sat on the bed. It had only been one week since the news broke, the world’s media had been spasmodic in their coverage; there was no doubting as to the truth. But yet, somewhere deep inside Diane, possibly adjacent to the gall bladder, Dean Cain was still alive.

Diane sat pondering this, when Lewis penetrated the room with a sudden jubilant bark. “I’ve found it, I’ve tracked it down,” he excitedly informed her, “turns out there’s a monk near the old monastery who has it in his barn.” Diane, roused out of her trance of Kent spells and bouncing Perry Whites, sprung up and, grabbing Lewis’ arm, thrust both of them out of the room.

Diane had long been a fan of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, ever since one day she was nonchalantly throwing Pez at the television dial and one of them inadvertently caused the channel to commute from My Two Dads to that Dean Cain noumenon. She, in her simple mindedness, put it down to fate. She found many likeminded fans on an internet message board, even meeting her future husband Lewis on there, who she concedes she was only attracted to because his name was rather akin to Lois, although he had a smaller penis than Teri Hatcher.

Since those alarming news stories began circulating, Diane and Lewis had found themselves embroiled in the sort of caper that’d have Dan Brown dancing pirouettes in his snakeskin jimmy-jams. Pynchon’s heroine may have cried however many rivers, tributaries, brooks, or whatever, but she never knew that a true caper must be transnational. Only where a narrative spills out into the streets of Mumbai, where a ragged traveller hooked on PCP wanders in and out of cafes wondering where the hell Bombay went, does a story really grow the feathers of a caper. And this one had feathers, so many in fact that a few actually had to be removed professionally by a plumage expert.

Rumours began to get bounced around in that fateful message board, talk of the fatal remote control having a history of homicide stretching back to the heady days of Ancient Greece. There was talk of Pythagoras biting the metaphoric bullet of that Panasonic monstrosity, of Aquinas getting the cursed object stuck in his robe, of Cervantes, upon finishing Don Quixote, reaching to take a bite out of his muffin, only to find a rectangle chunk of plastic in its place. It is thought that Proust and the remote control worked together to write Remembrance of Things Past, but at the last minute Marcel, that sneaky chappy, cut out all but his own name from the credits. Soon that infra-red wraith had Proust hanging upside his four-poster, begging for forgiveness. But the remote control knows no compassion.

So all this hearsay collated inside the filters of the message board, with various snippets percolating into the minds of its visitors, all with little vigour. Until there started the bubbling ferments of action, of retribution, of revenge, of verbs emitted without restraint. It became known (using a very broad definition of that term) that there was a way to kill it, a way to terminate its massacring dispositions. This in check, it was down to finding the infernal entity. Diane and Lewis opted to carry out this task. Such was the immensity and global reach of the baneful anathema, that they travelled to both Chile and Cambodia, Canada and Chad, Columbia and Costa Rica. In the heat of the quest they never even realised the absurdity of visiting only countries those name is initiated by a C. Both were draw up inside the nascent body of pursuit, a voluptuous and young essence that transported them from one destination to another.

In the end, as that intrusion near the beginning intimated (remember, back in the day), it was on the outskirts of town all along. So they gathered their corporeals and took off in their old hippy van. On the way to the Barn of Doom, as Lewis jokingly dubbed it, a joke that evoked much chuckling in the primitive humour nodes of Diane, the pair stopped off to pick up two compatriots from the message board. However this dyad proved to be so anonymous as to be virtually absent of names.

Parking across from the country house, the monk skirted down to them almost instantly. “By Teri Hatcher's jangly gonads! What took you so long?” yelled the monk, “I’ve got the thing trapped in the barn, but it won’t hold much longer.” From their angle they could see the barn already cascading in skews of diagonal vapour. The group rushed from the confines of the van, like some pseudo-Scooby gang, and headed off towards the barn. In Lewis’ clutches was that elixir they were told would render the remote control inanimate for a few hours, a suitable period of time to transfer it to its final place of destruction.

The nameless duo launched themselves in the side door in a moment of strategic, but also obtuse, thinking. They were the first wave. They were also, inevitably, the first fatalities.

Diane and Lewis stood on edge waiting for the final fragment of vertebrate to spout out the side door. Via a quick discussion they decided the best way to outsmart the rigid intellect facing them was to have Diane sporadically run past the door, slowly enough for it to see her, but also quick enough to avoid death. This would hopefully draw the beast out of it’s nesting area, where Lewis would provide himself as a projectile vessel for the elixir to reach its target. Lewis looked posed for some debate as to the particularities of this plan, one that’d inexorably result in his bodily demise, but it was too late, Diane was already sprinting in rhythmic pattern alongside the side of the barn.

Lewis saw the consumer electronics spectre meandering its way closer and closer towards the door. Once at the frame, it curiously peeked beyond the edges, and just then a frightened but vengeful Lewis launched himself Anime-style through the air and collided with jutting precision into the thorax of the fiend.

Once the cloudy miasma lifted, Diane went over to the doorway and found an inert remote control lying lifeless on a bale of hay. But Lewis was nowhere to be seen, he had indeed sacrificed himself for the good of the world; all that remained of him was a note that read: Thank you Dean Cain.

Diane wiped away a pearly drop of eye-brine and picked up her nemesis. She shot it an indefinable sneer and inserted it into a large black bag. She knew instinctively that only one part of this fable was over, she even smirked to herself at the thought of those readers whose preconceptions told them that that was it, things were resolved, all is back to normal, she’ll do her thing and that’ll be that. Stifling a guffaw, she imagined those same people watching Ringu, and thinking those same thoughts, oh that guy’ll be fine, just look at that there woman, she was ok, what could happen to him? Nothing I’m certain. Look at that beard for fucks sake.

But no, as she drove over the rural landscape she knew to prepare herself both mentally and physically for anything. Could a bored housewife from the suburbs, one so enamoured with the creaseless thighs of Dean Cain, really put a stop to the most powerful force of malediction that the world has ever seen? Was it truly possible? As she thought this over, the gentle stirrings of motion were birthing in her backseat.

Coming soon: The Dean Cain Retribution - Part 2 - Diane does epic battle with the remote control on top of an erupting volcano.